Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who teaches at New York University. He also apparently works at Time magazine and appears on television occasionally as an expert in foreign affairs. Sunday he created quite a firestorm when he tweeted out a fake quote attributed to President Trump. For a while, Bremmer doubled-down and refused to delete the tweet or apologize, even after other blue-checked progressives began sharing it widely. Today, Bremmer finally apologized:

He’s referring to this tweet from early this morning:

Here’s the fake quote that got this going:

Lots of people on the left thought it was not just plausible but real:

But while thousands of people were spreading the fake quote, Bremmer was playing games:

He said the fake quote was “a comment on the state of media and the twitterverse today.” I guess that’s true but it’s not one that makes him look very good.

Bremmer did finally delete the fake quote and all of his tweets defending it. Here’s the kicker though. Just one day before creating the fake tweet, Bremmer was calling for Trump to take down a “fake/doctored” video of Nancy Pelosi stammering.

Here’s a remaining question for you to ponder. How does Bremmer maintain his blue check when he’s intentionally inventing fake quotes? This guy is a progressive but I agree with him on this point.

I get that the check mark is to verify that someone is who they claim to be but it’s also probably one reason so many people RTd and quote tweeted what Bremmer said without checking to see if it was real.